Rooyesh

There has been a lot of misunderstanding as to why Iranian pro- democracy forces oppose the $75 million the U.S. government provides to aid civil society in their country [" A Lever of Change in Iran," op-ed, Oct. 19].

Allow me, as someone who spent six years in Tehran’s Evin Prison on a bogus charge of endangering national security, to clarify what we oppose and what we favor.

The threat of war looms over us. But Iran and the West need to have friendly and peaceful relations.

Peace is a product of democracy. Despotic states are furtive and untrustworthy. The Iranian people want a secular, democratic state that is committed to respecting human rights. The West would not need to fear a democratic Iran.

As a fundamentalist state, Iran is dangerous, but it is dangerous for its own people, not the United States. The Iranian people, myself included, need freedom, democracy and peace — not war conditions and constant worries about a potential barrage of U.S. missiles.

The seeds of democracy need fertile soil to take root and grow. In Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the soil is fertile for fostering fundamentalism. If fair elections were held in those countries, fundamentalists would win. Iran is the only country in the Middle East in which modern, democratic forces would win any free and fair elections. A peaceful transition to democracy is our goal. But the Iranian regime suppresses civil society on the pretext of a coming war and describes its opponents as U.S. stooges and mercenaries.

Governments provide foreign aid — indeed, form their foreign policies — based on their national interests; those who receive aid naturally have to align themselves with the donor’s policies. We understand this with regard to Iranian support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and various Afghan groups. Not surprisingly, the Iranian people do not want their democratic movement to be dependent on or subservient to any foreign government.

Consider, also, that U.S. foreign policy in Asia and Africa is dictated by American political and economic interests, not by concern for democracy. Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and many other countries with friendly relations with the United States are major violators of human rights and have despotic regimes. In none of these cases has the U.S. administration attached much importance to human rights violations, nor does it prioritize funds to help make those governments democratic.

Over the past two centuries, many Iranian politicians were paid or influenced by foreign powers. As a result, most Iranian intellectuals and democratic forces are deeply critical of external support. Iranians are viewed as discredited when they receive money from foreign governments. The Bush administration may be striving to help Iranian democrats, but any Iranian who seeks American dollars will not be recognized as a democrat by his or her fellow citizens.

The Iranian regime uses American funding as an excuse to persecute opponents. Although its accusations are false, this has proved effective in poisoning the public against the regime’s opponents. Fear of foreign meddling is one reason for the regime’s staying power.

Of course, Iran’s democratic movement and civil institutions need funding. But this must come from independent Iranian sources. Iranians themselves must support the transition to democracy; it cannot be presented like a gift. Expatriate Iranians can assist the transition. Many of the social prerequisites of democracy exist in Iran today, but dollars cannot produce the bravery or love of freedom that individuals need to make the transition possible.

So here is our request to Congress: To do away with any misunderstanding, we hope lawmakers will approve a bill that bans payment to individuals or groups opposing the Iranian government. Iran’s democratic movement does not need foreign handouts; it needs the moral support of the international community and condemnation of the Iranian regime for its systematic violation of human rights.

What else does the pro-democracy movement in Iran want?

The Iranian government is using technology it has purchased from Western companies to block Web sites and otherwise keep Iranians from using the Internet. The West has profited at the Iranian people’s expense by selling these technologies to Tehran. The regime’s extensive censorship and media hegemony must be ended. We want the Iranian people to have access to the Internet and free television to be able to hear criticism of the regime’s policies and learn about alternative models of government.

The support we need at this point has nothing to do with funding the regime’s opposition but with aiding Iranians in the quest for independent media and accurate information.

Akbar Ganji, an Iranian journalist and dissident, was in Evin Prison from 2000 to 2006. He received the 2007 John Humphrey Freedom Award, a Canadian human rights and pro-democracy prize. This column was translated from Farsi by Nilou Mobasser.

The prospect of war with Iran is beginning to look real. The hardening of positions in both Tehran and Washington over the past week has brought relations to their lowest point since the Iran hostage crisis that began in 1979.

Both sides insist that they seek no military conflict, but tensions on issues ranging from Iran’s nuclear program to influence in Iraq and the Arab-Israeli peace process is turning their differences into all-out regional power struggle. Last week, Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice criticized Iran’s “emboldened foreign policy” and “hegemonic aspirations,” while asserting that the U.S. will continue to be engaged on economic, political and security issues in the Middle East. “We are there to stay,” she declared.

On the critical issue of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, Tehran and Washington are now engaged in a game of geopolitical chicken, which favors hard-liners on both sides, making compromise more difficult, escalation more likely and war - by accident, if not by design - a greater possibility than before. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after stepping up defiance of U.S.-led efforts to compel Iran to halt enrichment, this week appeared to gain greater domestic influence over the issue with the replacement of Iran’s pragmatic top nuclear negotiator by a key Ahmadinejad ally.

After President Bush invoked the specter of World War III to press the urgency of stopping Iran, the Administration followed up with another round of punitive measures. “It looks like a slow-motion train wreck,” said Barbara Slavin, author of a new book, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S. and the Twisted Path to Confrontation. “Neither side is willing to back down and the chances for conflict are growing over the nuclear program and Iran’s support for U.S. adversaries in the Middle East.” The showdown has elements of a perfect storm. The decline of U.S. fortunes in Iraq has been accompanied by a rise in Iranian assertiveness, which has intensified with Ahmadinejad’s recent tough talk.

Trumpeting Iran’s nuclear ambitions as a nationalist cause, Ahmadinejad rejected the agreement by his moderate predecessor, Mohammed Khatami, to voluntarily suspend uranium-enrichment during three years of negotiations with European powers. Ahmadinejad abandoned Khatami’s “dialogue of civilizations” for more confrontational rhetoric, calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and goading the West by denying the Holocaust. Iran enthusiastically backed Hizballah and Hamas in their confrontations with Israel, and denounced the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Ahmadinejad has repeatedly pooh-poohed the idea that the U.S. might take military action against Iran, to the anger and alarm of others in the Iranian leadership structure, who accuse him of downplaying a real danger. Ahmadinejad says that he considers the U.N.’s case against Iran’s nuclear program closed, and dismisses U.N. sanctions as “piles of paper.” Bragging that Iran’s uranium-enrichment efforts have succeeded in achieving “the capacity for industrial-scale fuel cycle production,” he also recently withdrew a compromise Iranian proposal that would base its enrichment activities in an international consortium that would allow Western countries to participate in and monitor Iran’s activities. “The proposal was based on the situation last year,” Ahmadinejad explained.

“New terms must be defined.” Against the backdrop of crucial parliamentary elections in 2008 and his presidential reelection bid in 2009, Ahmadinejad is now seeking a greater leadership role in nuclear decision-making, which is controlled by the regime’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Last week, Ahmadinejad accepted the resignation of Ali Larijani, the pragmatic conservative chief negotiator who is a bitter political rival to the President. Although all Iranian leaders defend their right to uranium-enrichment technology for purposes of producing nuclear energy, Larijani believes it is in Iran’s national interests to reach an understanding with the West. But on at least two occasions, Ahmadinejad has publicly slapped down Larijani’s conciliatory efforts. A similar hardening of positions has been taking place in Washington, with U.S. rhetoric assuming a more confrontational tone in the past two weeks.

On Oct. 17, Bush warned that “if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace” that risked a third world war. Four days later, Vice President Dick Cheney warned, “The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences… We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Last week, a day after Rice told Congress that the U.S.’s 2006 offer of talks with Iran was “still on the table” if Tehran suspended enrichment activities, the Administration designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction, and named the Corps’ Quds division as a supporter of terrorism. The tougher tone suggests that U.S. policy has taken a subtle, yet decisive, turn toward not merely stopping Iran’s nuclear program, but seeking the end of the Islamic regime. Cheney’s objections to Iran went well beyond its uranium-enrichment activities, to include Iran’s policies toward Israel and the U.S., its activities in Iraq, its suppression of domestic opposition and what he called its drive for “hegemonic power” in the region - a term echoed by the less hawkish Rice in her congressional testimony. Cheney, like Bush and Rice, stopped short of advocating a new U.S. policy to aggressively pursue regime change, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the Vice President pointed the Administration in that direction.

He castigated “the nature of the regime”; said that Iranians have a “right to be free from oppression, from economic deprivation and tyranny”; and declared that “America looks forward to the day when Iranians reclaim their destiny.” Cheney’s indictment of Iran’s regime as one that deserves to be eliminated could be read as another point of U.S. pressure, designed to entice Iranian leaders to accept the U.S. offer to negotiate a peaceful end to the crisis. But such rhetoric, instead, may prove the point of Iran’s hard-liners, that there is really nothing for the U.S. and Iran to talk about.

Source: Time

Confronted by mounting U.S. and U.N. pressure, Iran has been steadily shifting its trade from West to East and, with the benefit of record high oil prices, is likely to be able to withstand the new U.S. sanctions, according to U.S., European and Iranian analysts.

China, a permanent member of the Security Council that can veto any U.N. resolution, is expected to overtake Germany as Iran’s biggest trading partner this year. Germany and other European countries had consistently been Iran’s largest trading partners for more than a decade, according to the Iran Investment Monthly.

The U.S. Treasury said that more than 40 banks, mostly in Europe, have curbed business with Iran as a result of U.S. pressure, but smaller banks, Islamic financial institutions and Asian banks are likely to step in and replace the Western financial institutions through which Iran has long sold oil on the international market. Oil traders said that Iran does an increasing portion of its petroleum sales in euros and yen, instead of U.S. dollars, and often through third parties, to help its customers circumvent U.S. financial sanctions. “Given particularly the price and demand for oil, Iran clearly has leverage with countries that need Iran’s oil,” said Shaul Bakhash, a George Mason University historian and author of “The Reign of the Ayatollahs.”

In addition, he said, “Iran has a huge cushion of foreign-exchange reserves.” Iran’s oil revenue this year will far exceed the government’s budget forecasts, which had assumed an average oil price of $60 a barrel. On Friday, oil settled above $90. The extra revenue will make it easier for the government to maintain social-services payments designed to bolster its popularity amid economic problems. Iran has also moved to protect what Leo Drollas, chief economist of the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, calls its Achilles’ heel — gasoline imports. Because of its limited refining capacity, Iran last year imported 200,000 barrels a day of gasoline, about a third of its consumption. But the government has trimmed gasoline subsidies, which has curtailed consumption and smuggling, cutting imports of gasoline in half. Nonetheless, U.S. efforts to exert financial pressure on Iran were having some impact, even before the new measures taken last week against firms linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Lukoil, a Russian company with an extensive gasoline marketing network in the United States, announced last Monday that its exploration work in Iran’s big Anaran oil field “is currently impeded because of the U.S. sanctions,” which bar investments of more than $20 million in Iran. The U.S. sanctions, announced Thursday, complicate new oil projects by targeting Iran’s main oil-field engineering firms. The firms are controlled by the Revolutionary Guard, which the Bush administration has accused of supporting terrorism and aiding nuclear proliferation. One of the firms sanctioned Thursday, Khatam al-Anbiya, is the rough equivalent of the Army Corps of Engineers, according to Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Treasury Department said the firm had $7 billion of contracts in the oil, natural gas and transportation sectors. European oil companies are holding off on exploration and production deals in Iran. Royal Dutch Shell, Total of France and Italy’s ENI have held talks or reached preliminary agreements for new oil and gas projects in Iran in recent years. But now they say they are unlikely to move ahead, in large part because of the commercial terms Iran is offering. Chinese oil companies have not signed contracts yet for commercial reasons, according to Julia Nanay, a Caspian region expert at PFC Energy, a Washington consulting firm. The picture on the financial front is similar.

The United Arab Emirates, a key transit point for Iranian imports and a major financial center for Iran, had closed 42 firms doing business with Iran before the new sanctions list, said an official there. He said it remained unclear how the new U.S. measures would affect Iran’s Bank Melli, targeted by Treasury for allegedly facilitating ballistic and nuclear equipment purchases. The bank, Iran’s largest, had nearly $1.4 billion in assets in its U.A.E. branches at the end of 2005, according to its Web site. Bank Melli also has branches in London, Paris and Hamburg. Even if Iran finds ways around U.S. financial sanctions, U.S. pressure could increase the costs of Iran’s international banking transactions. European and Japanese banks have made it more difficult for Iran to arrange letters of credit, Drollas said. “Most of Kuwait’s banks have stopped dealing with Iranian accounts,” said Abdul Majeed al-Shatti, chairman of Commercial Bank of Kuwait. “There are opportunities in Iran. Unfortunately, we need to be part of the international system,” he said. “We have a lot of dealings with the United States.”

He said his bank had not issued any letters of credit for transactions with Iran in more than a year. “It raises the cost of operation for all Iranian banks,” said Jahangir Amuzegar, a former Iranian finance minister and representative to the World Bank before Iran’s Islamic revolution. “But whether sanctions are going to cripple banking operations, I don’t think so. Sanctions are effective only if they are comprehensive and universal.” Germany and France have been slowly reducing banking exposure and government credit guarantees for exports to Iran, thus shrinking potential for losses in the event of a confrontation with Tehran. Germany issued about $2 billion of credit guarantees for trade with Iran in 2005, helping companies do business that might otherwise be too risky. This year, the government said, the guarantees will drop to about $715 million. France’s embassy in Washington said French banks reduced their exposure to Iran from $5.7 billion in December 2005 to $3.8 billion a year by the end of 2006. Both countries still buy oil from Iran. The most important question may be what political and psychological impact the sanctions will have on Iran, especially with parliamentary elections next spring and presidential elections in 2009.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has faced growing internal rumblings over his erratic economic policies. A few critics of the regime inside Iran have gone public. “Are we to endure the hardship of sanctions and other harsh measures on our nation as a result of our illogical and unreal glorification?” Mohsen Mirdamadi, former chairman of parliament’s foreign relations committee, said at a reformist conference Friday. But other observers said that sanctions had little political effect in places like Cuba, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa and North Korea. “Iranians have a strong sense of themselves,” said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy. “If these new sanctions create internal problems and cause the people to unify, then they won’t work. But if the sanctions can drive a wedge” between the regime and its constituents, they have a chance to work. Sanctions could even generate greater resistance. “This is a regime that hates to be seen to be backing off under international and U.S. pressure, so it seems unlikely that the threat of international sanctions alone will cause the Iranians to back off on the nuclear issue,” said Bakhash, the George Mason historian. Carnegie’s Sadjadpour said: “These sanctions are not negligible, and they’re not going to be pain-free for Iran. The question is: Will they be substantial and painful enough to change Iranian behavior? No, I don’t think they will be.”

Source: The Washington Post

Axis Of Evil: Parliamentary objections to Iran’s nuclear negotiator being replaced with a flunky of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are a sign of his regime’s unpopularity.

Could a U.S.-backed coup prevent the need to bomb? Iran’s holocaust-denying, Israel-loathing president was forced to return to Tehran on Tuesday from a two-day visit to Armenia to attend to “unexpected developments” back home. On Monday, some 183 of the 290 members of Iran’s Majlis passed a resolution extolling the performance of Ali Larijani, the regime’s chief nuclear negotiator who unexpectedly resigned over the weekend. Larijani had clashed with Ahmadinejad regarding nuclear talks; the unknown diplomat named as his successor, Saeed Jalili, is a Mahmoud loyalist. So many lawmakers, most of them conservatives, expressing support for Larijani is clearly a snub at Ahmadinejad. One segment of parliament wrote to Ahmadinejad to complain of their not being consulted or even told before Larijani’s replacement. Yet the episode is only a small sample of Iran’s profound internal opposition and dissent almost 28 years after the establishment of its theocratic Islamic Republic.

The resistance comes from Islamic and non-Islamic sources: The Ayatollah Mohammed Kazemeini Boroujerdi is one of many Iran clerics adhering to the traditional Shiite belief that clerical rule by its very nature subjugates religion to the will of the state. After Boroujerdi preached to a large crowd at a Tehran stadium in the summer of 2006, attempts to arrest him failed because of throngs of supporters at his home. When Boroujerdi finally was seized in October 2006, hundreds of the thousands of protesters supporting him were arrested and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards could not clear crowds blocking the roads. In publicly opposing the regime for over a decade, Boroujerdi has spent months in jail. His father, also a cleric, died under suspicious circumstances in 2002; the mosque where his father preached was confiscated and his grave desecrated.

Ahmad Batebi had a death sentence reduced to 15 and then 10 years in prison for leading the pro-democracy student movement in Iran in 1999. Released temporarily to marry in 2005, Batebi went on the run to organize opposition preceding Ahmadinejad’s inauguration as president and was caught the next year. He was famously shown holding up the bloodied shirt of a fellow student on the cover of the Economist magazine. In 2007, at the age of 29, he suffered a stroke after years of prison abuse. He remains incarcerated in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. Batebi’s wife also has been arrested and harassed. Student activists report that unprecedented numbers of college students, in the hundreds, have been disciplined for opposing Tehran’s Islamofascist regime. Akbar Ganji, an original supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamist revolution in 1979, joined the Revolutionary Guards and worked in the government’s ministry of culture. But he was to become disenchanted with the regime and became a journalist and dissident. After participating in a conference in Berlin critiquing Iran’s elections, Ganji was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment plus five years’ internal exile, later shortened to six months.

The next year he was given an additional six years in jail for articles he wrote and for possessing copies of foreign newspapers. He was released from Evin last year in poor health. Ganji has called the 2005 elections that gave Ahmadinejad the presidency “make-believe,” and has called for civil disobedience against the regime. In the 1980s, President Reagan, joined by Margaret Thatcher in Britain, led the West in successfully fighting the Cold War. We finally stopped pretending that containment and accommodation were options in dealing with the Soviet threat.

One of the ways we opposed that imperialism was to support the freedom fighters in Russian outposts like Afghanistan and Nicaragua. In his new book, “The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction,” Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute argues that “political support for the tens of millions of Iranians who detest their tyrannical leaders is both morally obligatory and strategically sound” as a U.S. policy, and he considers it far preferable to a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. With 40% of Iranians living in poverty, unemployment at 15% (vs. under 3% during the Shah’s rule), and inflation so high that a new banknote featuring the atomic symbol was issued this year for 50,000 rials (worth well under $20), now may be the time to help Iranians themselves get rid of the world’s foremost danger.

Source: Investor’s Business Daily

President Bush isn’t the only one shaking his fist at Iran these days. Getting tough with Tehran is an increasingly popular bipartisan sport in Washington. 

Both the House and Senate have called on the administration to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. Although those congressional resolutions lack the force of law, critics, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), worry that they could be construed by the White House as legal justification for U.S. attacks on Revolutionary Guard targets in Iran.

A terrorist designation by the State Department would allow the United States to levy sanctions against foreign companies and financial institutions that do business with the elite Guard. (American companies are already prevented from doing business with Iran.) But the administration appears to have misgivings about the terrorist designation — and for good reason.

No nation’s armed forces have ever been formally labeled “terrorist,” though Iran has been on the State Department’s list of countries that sponsor terrorism since 1984. Such a designation for the Revolutionary Guard, a 125,000-member military and intelligence force, would be a radical move that could have unforeseen consequences. Former Guard officers hold 14 of the 21 seats in the Iranian Cabinet, 80 of the 290 seats in the parliament and a host of other political and appointed offices. It’s often unclear — at least to the intelligence-challenged United States — who is currently a Guard officer, who is an alumnus and what are the relationships between any current or former Guardsman and the group’s multibillion-dollar business ventures.

Moreover, the terrorist designation would make it even more difficult to find senior Iranian leaders who could negotiate with the United States or Europe. Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, is a former Guardsman, and the U.S. has accused the Iranian ambassador to Iraq of hiding his current membership in the Guard.

Rather than risking over-broad new sanctions, it would be wiser for the Treasury Department to target those Iranian officials known to be involved in terrorist activities or in specific business ventures whose proceeds fund the country’s nuclear program. Or it might focus on specific units of the Guard, such as the notorious Quds Force, which is accused of arming Iraqi insurgents. But far more important than fashioning more U.S. penalties that other countries will ignore is gaining the cooperation of German, Chinese and Russian officials in enforcing existing sanctions. Taking the prospect of a U.S. military strike against Iran off the table, at least for the duration of the Bush administration, could help.

Escalating hostilities will not advance what must be the primary U.S. goal: deterring Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and thus destabilizing the entire Middle East. Tehran must decide that keeping its nuclear program is not worth the cost in economic and political isolation. And Washington must decide what it is willing to offer Russia and China to induce their cooperation in constraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Meanwhile, Congress should make clear that it will not countenance a disastrous expansion of the Iraq war to Iran. It should start by passing legislation written by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and co-sponsored by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) that prohibits the use of U.S. funds for military operations in Iran, its airspace or waters without specific congressional authorization. The bill carefully leaves exceptions for intelligence, hot pursuit and repelling an Iranian attack. It may not suffice to prevent a deliberate or unwitting clash with Iran — but it is an essential first step.

Source: The Los Angeles Times

The George W. Bush administration’s shift from the military option of a massive strategic attack against Iran to a surgical strike against selected targets associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC),

reported by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker earlier this month, appears to have been prompted not by new alarm at Iran’s role in Iraq but by the explicit opposition of the nation’s top military leaders to an unprovoked attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The reorientation of the military threat was first signaled by passages on Iran in Bush’s Jan. 10 speech and followed by only a few weeks a decisive rejection by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of a strategic attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Although scarcely mentioned in press reports of the speech, which was devoted almost entirely to announcing the troop “surge” in Iraq, Bush accused both Iran and Syria of “allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq”. Bush also alleged that Iran was “providing material support for attacks on American troops”.

Those passages were intended in part to put pressure on Iran, and were accompanied by an intensification of a campaign begun the previous month to seize Iranian officials inside Iraq. But according to Hillary Mann, who was director for Persian Gulf and Afghanistan Affairs on the National Security Council staff in 2003, they also provided a legal basis for a possible attack on Iran.

“I believe the president chose his words very carefully,” says Mann, “and laid down a legal predicate that could be used to justify later military action against Iran.”

Mann says her interpretation of the language is based on the claim by the White House of a right to attack another country in “anticipatory self-defence” based on Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. That had been the legal basis cited by then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had in September 2002 in making the case for the invasion of Iraq.

The introduction of a new reason for striking Iran, which also implied a much more limited set of targets related to Iraq, followed a meeting between Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Dec. 13, 2006 in which the uniformed military leaders rejected a strike against Iran’s nuclear programme. Time magazine political columnist Joe Klein, reported last May that military and intelligence sources told him that Bush had asked the Joint Chiefs at the meeting about a possible strike against the Iranian nuclear programme, and that they had unanimously opposed such an attack.

Mann says that she was also told by her own contacts in the Pentagon that the Joint Chiefs had expressed opposition to a strike against Iran.

The Joint Chiefs were soon joined in opposition to a strike on Iran by Admiral William Fallon, who was nominated to become CENTCOM commander in January. Mann says Pentagon contacts have also told her that Fallon made his opposition to war against Iran clear to the White House.

IPS reported last May that Fallon had indicated privately that he was determined to prevent an attack on Iran and even prepared to resign to do so. A source who met with Fallon at the time of his confirmation hearing quoted him as vowing that there would be “no war with Iran” while he was CENTCOM commander and as hinting very strongly that he would quit rather than go along with an attack.

Although he did not specifically refer to the Joint Chiefs, Fallon also suggested that other military leaders were opposing a strike against Iran, saying, “There are several of us who are trying to put the crazies back in the box,” according to the same source.

Fallon’s opposition to a strike against Iranian nuclear, military and economic targets would make it very difficult, if not impossible for the White House to carry out such an operation, according to military experts. As CENTCOM commander, Fallon has complete control over all military access to the region, says retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, an expert on military strategy who has taught at the National War College.

Douglas McGregor, a retired Army Lt. Col. who was a tank commander in the 1991 Gulf War and has taught at the National Defense University, agrees. “I find it hard to imagine that anything can happen in the area without the involvement of the Central Command,” says McGregor.

The possibility that Fallon might object to an unprovoked attack on Iran or even resign over the issue represents a significant deterrent to such an attack.

Former NSC adviser Mann believes the Iraq-focused strategy is now aimed at averting any resignation threat by Fallon or other military leaders by carrying out a very limited strike that would be presented as a response to a specific incident in Iraq in which the deaths of U.S. soldiers could be attributed to Iranian policy. She says she doubts Fallon and other military leaders would “fall on their swords” over such a strike.

Gardiner agrees that Fallon is unlikely to refuse to carry out such a limited strike under those circumstances.

Mann believes the Bush-Cheney purpose in advancing the strategy is to provoke Iranian retaliation. “The concern I have is that it would be just enough so Iranians would retaliation against U.S. allies,” she says.

But the issue of what evidence of Iranian complicity would be adequate to justify such a strike evidently remains a matter of debate within the administration. A story published by McClatchy newspapers Aug. 9 reported that Vice President Dick Cheney had argued some weeks earlier for a strike against camps in Iran allegedly used to train Iraqi Shiite militiamen fighting U.S. troops if “hard new evidence” could be obtained of Iran’s complicity in supporting anti-U.S. forces in Iraq.

But Cheney and his allies have been frustrated in the search for such evidence. Mann notes that British forces in southern Iraq patrolled the border very aggressively for six months last year to find evidence of Iranian involvement in supplying weapons to Iraqi guerrillas but found nothing.

After several months of trying to establish specific links between Iraqis suspected of trafficking in weapons to a specific Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard contact, the U.S. command has not claimed a single case of such a link. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. commander for southern Iraq, where most of the Shiite militias operate, admitted in a Jul. 6 briefing that his troops had not captured “anybody that we can tie to Iran”.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is known to be closely allied with Cheney on Iran policy, has betrayed impatience with a policy that depends on obtaining proof of Iranian complicity in attacks. On Jun. 11 he called for “strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.”

Lieberman repeated that position on Jul. 2, but thus far it has not prevailed.

Source: IPS

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in June 2005.

Ali Larijani, head of the Supreme National Security Council, and Iran’s chief negotiator with international bodies over Iran’s controversial nuclear program, is reported to have abruptly resigned his post. 

Little information has surfaced thus far about Larijani’s reasons, but it can be assumed that the abrupt resignation by such a key figure suggests a serious crisis within the Iranian regime concerning how to handle the international dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. The Bush administration has warned Iran that it faces possible military action if it does not voluntarily abandon its uranium enrichment program.

It appears to be a significant domestic political boost at least in the short term for Larijani’s rival, President Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad’s spokesman Ghloam-Hossein Elham announced Larijani’s resignation at a weekly press briefing. Elham also said that another close Ahmadinejad ally, Deputy Foreign Minister for European and American Affairs Saeed Jalili, would probably replace Larijani.

On paper and often in practice, Larijani held more sway over Iranian foreign policy than Ahmadinejad. The SNSS formulates foreign and security policy under the authority of Iran’s Supreme Leader and the SNSS chief has thus played a more influential role than the president, who is merely one member of the council.

Although a staunch conservative, Larijani is a strong proponent within the Iranian regime for cooperation with the West, and is known to have been upset by anti-Israel rhetoric by Ahmadinejad that seriously damaged Iran’s international standing. As the main interlocutor with the West in Iran’s efforts to head off further sanctions and win agreement for its nuclear program to continue, Larijani’s cause was not aided by Ahmadinejad’s recent speech at the U.N. in which he declared the nuclear issue over.

Elham told reporters that Larijani had tried to resign before but the president had refused to accept his resignation. The two were rivals in the 2005 presidential election and have maintained an increasingly stormy relationship ever since. His departure indicates that the Supreme Leader was willing to side with Ahmadinejad in the power struggle. Unless the Larijani-Ahmadinejad friction was purely personal, this would suggest that Iran may be in no mood right now to acquiesce to U.S. pressure and suspend its enrichment efforts even temporarily.

Given Larijani’s experience and pragmatic outlook, his absence could deal a serious blow to Iran’s efforts to negotiate a successful outcome of its international dispute. He was scheduled to have another meeting on the issue next week with European envoy Javier Solana. He may be quitting in part to prepare himself to make a major challenge to Ahmadinejad in the next presidential balloting due in 2009. But if the nuclear standoff continues, Iran’s crisis may have significantly worsened by the time voters go to the polls.

–By Scott MacLeod/Cairo

The Iranian government announced Saturday that its top nuclear negotiator had resigned, a move seen as a victory for hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that could bring about an even tougher stance in ongoing talks.

Government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham, said Saeed Jalili, a little-known deputy foreign minister for European and American affairs, was to succeed Ali Larijani as lead negotiator effective immediately. Larijani in many cases held a hardline view on the nuclear standoff between Iran and the West but was also considered to be a more moderate figure than Ahmadinejad within Iran’s hardline camp. He was seen as more committed to a diplomatic solution over Iran’s nuclear program while Ahmadinejad is seen as not favoring talks with the West. Larijani’s resignation was interpreted by many here as giving Ahmadinejad a free hand in dictating his views to the less experienced Jalili.

Elham did not give a specific reason for Larijani’s resignation other than to say he wanted to focus on “other political activities.” “Larijani had resigned repeatedly. Finally, the president accepted his resignation,” Elham told reporters. The United States and some of its allies accuse Iran of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons. Iran denies the claim, saying its program is for peaceful purposes including generating electricity. Elham stressed that Iran’s nuclear policy would not change because of Larijani’s resignation. “Iran’s nuclear policies are stabilized and unchangeable. Managerial change won’t bring any changes in (those) policies,” Elham said.

Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton said Larijani’s resignation was “a clear victory for Ahmadinejad” and shows that “the leadership is determined to continue with the nuclear program.” Bolton, who served as the Bush administration’s point man on the Iran nuclear issue before becoming U.N. ambassador, said the conflict between Larijani and Ahmadinejad is “part of the larger struggle for power after (Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei dies.” “It’s more about personalities and internal polices, but Ahmadminejad saw Larijani as someone with a different perspective on (nuclear) negotiations,” Bolton told The Associated Press, suggesting Larijani was more moderate. Elham said a meeting between the nuclear negotiator and the European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, scheduled for Tuesday in Rome would still take place. “Despite Larijani’s resignation, meetings … won’t change. Larijani’s successor will meet Solana instead,” Elham said. Ahmadinejad was elected president in 2005 and appointed Larijani, a former Revolutionary Guards Corps commander and a close ally of Khamenei, to replace Hasan Rowhani, considered a moderate politician. Ahmadinejad had accused Rowhani and his team of technocrats as weak and giving too many concessions in nuclear talks with European nations. After Larijani was appointed, Iran took a more defiant approach to its nuclear program.

It resumed uranium enrichment activities, leading to its referral to the U.N. Security Council by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2006. Iran’s refusal to halt enrichment subsequently prompted a resolution by the U.N. Security Council imposing sanctions on Iran in December 2006 and another resolution widening the sanctions in March. In 2006, Larijani rejected Western economic incentives in return for a suspension of Iran’s nuclear activities, saying the Security Council “should not think that they can make us happy with candies.” However, differences between Larijani and Ahmadinejad were revealed earlier this year when Larijani became upset after the president contradicted him on whether Iran would attend a meeting in Egypt to discuss Iraq. Larijani traveled to Baghdad in May to discuss Iran’s conditions for attending the meeting but was upset after a reporter at the Baghdad airport said Ahmadinejad had already confirmed that Iran would attend. Larijani’s absence during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with Khamenei, last week further raised eyebrows in Iran’s political circles.

Before he was appointed, Larijani was the head of Iran’s state-run radio and television network and was seen as one of the hard-liners’ most effective weapon in curtailing former President Mohammad Khatami’s reform program. At the time, Larijani used the official media as a weapon to suppress democratic reforms and prohibited the broadcast of information that might have been harmful to hardline clerics.

Source: The Associated Press

VLADIMIR PUTIN is an erudite man. During a meeting with Germany’s Angela Merkel in Wiesbaden on October 15th, he noted that this was the spa town where Dostoyevsky played and lost at roulette.

Yet in Tehran the next day, he kept his knowledge of 19th-century literature quiet, choosing not to mention a Russian poet and diplomat, Alexander Griboyedov, who was killed in Tehran when the Russian embassy was destroyed by a mob.

Russia’s deep-rooted apprehension about Iran echoed in the news spread by its security services on the eve of Mr Putin’s visit that Islamic fanatics were plotting to kill the Russian president. This added spice to Mr Putin’s attendance at a summit of Caspian countries. (The last Russian leader to come to Tehran was Stalin in 1943, for a summit meeting with Churchill and Roosevelt.)

On the face of it, Mr Putin gets on with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; he even invited the Iranian president to Moscow. Talking to a Russian news agency, Mr Ahmadinejad insisted that Russia and Iran were natural allies. As for Mr Putin, he noted that “Russia is the only country that has assisted Iran in implementing its peaceful nuclear programme.” And, in a dig at the West, he said “we should not even be thinking of making use of force in the region”, and that no Caspian country should allow its territory to be used by a third country as a military base against another.

This chumminess may seem just another example of Russia’s anti-Western foreign policy, especially as it came soon after a frosty meeting with Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates, respectively America’s secretaries of state and defence. Mr Putin kept the two waiting for more than half an hour, and then poured scorn on America’s planned missile-defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic. He also repeated Russia’s threats to pull out of the INF treaty to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles, unless its curbs are extended to other countries.

Certainly Russia’s foreign policy has not been helpful to America. But it was never meant to be. Russia only reluctantly signed up to two United Nations sanctions resolutions against Iran, and it has so far refused to back a third. Mr Putin claims that there is no evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, and argues that further sanctions will do no good to anyone. Less helpful to the West has been the sale of Russian anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.

As far as Mr Putin is concerned, Russia has its own interests, which differ from America’s. Russia is worried about Iran becoming a nuclear power: Iran is far nearer Moscow than Washington, and a nuclear power to the south is the last thing Russia wants. Nor does Mr Putin take lightly Iran’s threat to wipe out Israel. He told a European Jewish Congress in Moscow that Russia and Israel were the two countries most threatened by a nuclear Iran. This week Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, flew to Moscow to discuss Mr Putin’s ideas for breaking the deadlock over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, as well as the Palestinian peace process.

Yet Russia has no wish to alienate Iran, either. Iran has kept out of Russia’s military conflict in Chechnya and has not intervened in either the Caucasus or Central Asia. Russia wants to keep it that way, and also to protect its own commercial interests in Iran. On this basis, to be seen to back even a hypothetical attack on Iran by the Americans would be suicidal. Which is not to say that Russia would side with Iran in any military conflict. “An American pilot hit by a Russian-made rocket would not be in Russia’s interest,” comments Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Centre in Moscow.

This is also why, for all his apparent friendliness, Mr Putin trod carefully in Tehran. He went out of his way to explain that his visit was planned five years ago as part of a five-country summit, not a bilateral trip. He did not pledge Russian support for Iran in case of a military attack, and he refused to set a date for the delivery of the nuclear fuel for the Bushehr nuclear reactor complex that Russia has helped Iran complete. “I only gave promises to my mother when I was a little boy,” Mr Putin sneered in answer to an Iranian journalist.

Mr Putin’s visit to Tehran is an example of the sort of independent foreign policy that the Kremlin favours these days. When Mr Putin telephoned George Bush immediately after the September 11th, 2001 attacks he made the choice to ally Russia’s interests with those of America. That alliance no longer holds. Russia may not be with Iran, but it is not with America and Europe either. It continues to oppose missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic (see article), not because they threaten Russia’s own nuclear capacity, but because they do not sit with the Kremlin’s world view. “What Russia craves is respect. It does not want to be a junior partner—it wants to be an equal,” says Mr Trenin. That makes Russia less ready than it once was to cede to Western pressures.

Russia is, of course, entitled to pursue its own interests. What is less clear is whether it will serve these in the longer term by distancing itself from the West. An aggressive energy policy in Europe has backfired as the Europeans look for ways to protect themselves from Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas giant. Mr Putin’s independent foreign policy thus carries its own risks. He can only hope to be luckier than the famous 19th century Russian novelist was in Germany.

Source: Economist

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said the world must not be “forced into retreat” against Islamic terrorists as it faced a situation similar to the Nazi threat before World War II.

In his first major speech since leaving office in June, Blair told a charity dinner in New York: “Analogies with the past are never properly accurate and analogies especially with the rising fascism can be easily misleading but in pure chronology I sometimes wonder if we’re not in the 1920s or 1930s again.

“This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilizing countries whose people wish to live in peace.”

Blair’s speech Thursday came days after U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated the Bush administration’s stance that “all options” must be kept “on the table” in confronting the threats posed by Iran. This was a reference to the option of using military action against the long-time U.S. adversary.

Addressing the issue of terrorists, Blair continued: “There is a tendency even now, even in some of our own circles, to believe that they are as they are because we have provoked them and if we left them alone they would leave us alone,” he said.

Blair, who gave strong personal backing to U.S. President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks, added: “I fear this is mistaken. They have no intention of leaving us alone.

“They have made their choice and leave us with only one to make — to be forced into retreat or to exhibit even greater determination and belief in standing up for our values than they do in standing up for their’s.”

Blair, who now represents the Quartet of the United States, Europe, Russia and the United Nations on the Middle East, said: “Unfortunately I tell you in all frankness that this struggle is far from over.

“Out there in the Middle East we’ve seen … the ideology driving this extremism and terror is not exhausted. On the contrary it believes it can and will exhaust us first.

He added: “America and Europe should not be divided, we should stand up together.

“The values we share are as vital and true and, above all, needed today as they have been at any time in the last 100 years.”

Source: Time